Future Valedictorians - A video of the preschool at Arzu in Bamiyan

Future Valedictorians - the preschool at Arzu in Bamiyan province



This video is precious.  I love it.

But then my cynical side comes out and thinks 'This is the perfect target for a suicide bomber'.  A school that teaches girls and women how to live productive and stable lives.  The Taliban probably can't wait to blow this place up! 

Building a school for Hazara refugees in Herat

from http://drymouth.tumblr.com/



I was in Herat, hosted by the Italian forces a couple of months ago. Faced with a dearth of stories sticking with the military, I “unembedded” myself. This is where you sign a bunch of papers saying you’re leaving the care and protection of whatever forces you’re with and heading out on your own. If misfortune should befall you, you or anyone cannot claim damages from the Italians or Americans or whoever you were originally accompanying.
Herat is known as a safe city. This is, of course, a relative term, but in general, the main threat here is kidnappings of wealthy Afghan businesspeople. Military institutions, such as the Provincial Reconstruction Team have been attacked and the Heratis also love a good protest, but it’s largely quiet and surprisingly well-developed and beautiful. A beautiful blue mosque is a popular attraction, as well as the recently repaired Herat citadel.
I met up with a local Afghan female journalist, named Massouma. Like many working Afghan women, she had a number of jobs: journalist for ISAF’s Dari-language radio station; women’s rights activist; blog circle webmaster and “homemaker” (as the Americans would call it). Of Hazara ethnicity, which by and large offers its women more freedoms in terms of working, she and her husband took me for pizza and one of the more upmarket restaurants and then to a school that they’d founded and built, purely from their own salaries.
The school was originally meant to be a profit-making business. But, in choosing the cheapest plot of land, they soon discovered that the reason the price was so good was that the surrounding area was prone to flooding and, therefore, had a large population of Hazara refugees from Iran. These were people, who had escaped the fighting before 2001 and had returned to no jobs, homes or were forced to eke out a living in the city, as there was little to no work in the countryside.
She told me how taking on 100 students from these refugee communities, as a free school, presented its own peculiar problems. Many of the children would bring knives to school, have bad hygiene or malnutrition. They had no social skills and would resort to violence or crying. The parents were not much better. Massouma and her small team of female teachers had to start at the beginning, with social behaviour classes for the children and handicraft classes for the mothers; giving them a chance to raise money in the bazaar with their wares and also keep them from gossiping in the schoolyard.
Registering the school with the Ministry of Education, she was told the students had to have a uniform. The cheapest option, on visiting the market, was to buy the kids imported Chinese sweatshirts of bodybuilders. Unable to afford to take on more than 100 children, she decided to make the school a permanent two grade institute, which would move up as the children grew older. They started at kindergarten and grade one, now the children are at grades two and three.
Thanks to some funding from the US, they hired an English teacher and now the majority of the children are beyond the level usually accorded to their age. However, the second floor of the building is yet to be completed and there’s no heating for the winter months.
Massouma tells me her ambition is to keep renewing the curriculum, year on year until the kids graduate and then found the first free university. However, with funding pulling out already, even prior to the complete 2014 withdrawal of foreign forces, it’ll be a tough job for Massouma and her husband to continue their pet project.

Anyhow, the footage I took from my coincidental meeting with Massouma made it into a wider piece by my colleague, @jaketupman, on female entrepreneurs.  

ARZU 2012 highlights

A weaver's hand, decorated in henna, runs through the loom.


The ARZU preschool class smiles for the camera in the Women's Community Center courtyard in Bamyan



The completed stage and bandstand in the newly constructed ARZU Community Field and Family Park in Bamyan. The Second Vice President of Afghanistan used this stage to speak to the Afghan people. (October 2012



ARZU weaver Firoza smiles while holding her son



Construction on the second ARZU Women's Community Center in Shashpul.



A young girl in ARZU's preschool asks her teacher a question during class




Two girls laugh together at the ARZU Garden Center playground.

Arzu, which means “hope” in Dari, is an innovative model of social entrepreneurship to help Afghan women weavers & their families break the cycle of poverty by providing them steady income & access to education. http://arzustudiohope.org/

Mission

ARZU STUDIO HOPE's mission is to create economic sustainability for global communities in need.

Company Overview

ARZU, which means “hope” in Dari, is an innovative model of social entrepreneurship that helps Afghan women weavers and their families break the cycle of poverty by providing them steady income and access to education and healthcare by sourcing and selling the rugs they weave. While structured as a 501(c)(3) in the United States and an international NGO in Afghanistan, ARZU operates as a “for-bene...fit” corporation, using private sector practices to create jobs in desperately poor rural villages where little opportunity exists.

Following its fifth anniversary in June 2009, ARZU evolved to grow as a more global brand called, ARZU STUDIO HOPE.

ARZU STUDIO HOPE continues to support a holistic approach to sustainable poverty alleviation achieved through artisan-based employment that empowers women. Women, earning fair labor wages, weave exquisite hand-knotted rugs at home. Innovative social benefit practices drive transformational change by providing grassroots access to vital education, healthcare, clean water and sustainable community development programs.

Afghanistan's past is being 'rewritten'

Why Afghanistan's past is being 'rewritten'

By Bilal Sarwary BBC News, Sarubi and Charikar

 

Afghanistan's government is rewriting history, literally.

The education ministry has endorsed a new history curriculum for school students that deletes nearly four decades of the country's war-torn past.

The government says textbooks based on the new curriculum will help bring unity in a country traditionally polarised along ethnic and political lines.

But critics accuse ministers of trying to appease the Taliban and other powerful groups by erasing history that portrays them in a bad light. They say the government is trying to win over the Taliban before Nato and US forces leave the country.

Afghanistan is entering a hugely uncertain time post-Nato, during which tricky arrangements with the Taliban and other players are expected.
'No mention of the misery'
The past 40 years in Afghanistan have been some of the most turbulent of any country in the world.

The suffering of people in the Shomali plains is not mentioned in textbooks

But the bloody coups of the 1970s, the 1979 Soviet invasion, the Moscow-backed communist regimes in Kabul and countless human rights excesses committed by secret police have all been erased from the history curriculum, critics say.

Nor is there much mention of the bloody civil war between mujahideen factions that tore Kabul apart in the 1990s, leaving an estimated 70,000 people dead.

That conflict gave rise to the Taliban - but there is not much mention of them either, or the US-led forces that drove them from power and have stayed for more than a decade.

An Afghan journalist, who did not wish to be identified for security reasons, told the BBC he was surprised the civil war and the Taliban regime had been wrapped up in just a few lines.

''There is no mention of the misery [the war] brought. No mention of Kabul being the killing zone. The books say Mullah Omar was removed in 2001, without saying who Mullah Omar was.

"There is no mention of the US and Nato presence. It is as if someone is trying to hide the sun with two fingers."

The education ministry denies suggestions that foreigners had any role in devising the new curriculum, and US military officials say they had no discussions on content in the books, some of which were paid for with US money.

But a spokesman for the US military in Kabul, David Lakin, added: ''Our cultural advisers reviewed the social studies textbooks for inappropriate material, such as inciting violence or religious discrimination."

The BBC visited two schools just outside Kabul where the new books have been introduced.

At one - Sarubi High School, 75km (40 miles) from Kabul - I sat in on a class and listened as a teacher asked one of his grade six students to read from his glossy new history textbook.

The chapter was on Sardar Mohammad Daud Khan, prime minister from 1953-63 and the country's president 10 years later.

The chapter talks about Daud Khan's rise but is silent on the full details of how he overthrew the monarchy of his first cousin, Mohammed Zahir Shah.

The following chapters, too, make no mention of the numerous bloody coups that unsettled the country's political landscape, the Moscow-backed regimes including that of President Najibullah, the civil war that began after his resignation or the rise in 1996 of the Taliban and their subsequent fall.
'Children will never know'
"What happened in Sarubi during the Soviet invasion?" I asked 11-year-old Muslim, who was listening diligently to his classmate.

Students will find few references to the rise and fall of the Taliban

''The Russians wanted to remove Islam from Afghanistan. A lot of people got killed, villages were bombed. Millions were forced to take refuge in Pakistan,'' the boy says.

"How do you know? This information doesn't exist in your history book."

"My parents and teachers told me," he says innocently.

The teacher, who also requested anonymity, says the new textbooks will deprive knowledge of the past to an entire generation.

"Since internet penetration is low and contact with the outside world is limited, children in Afghanistan are more dependent on textbooks than anywhere else in the world," he said.

"But now that the government has decided to delete the past 40 turbulent years from history books, millions of children will never know why and how the Afghanistan we live in came to be."

Like Sarubi, the Shomali plains north of Kabul also suffered the excesses of the Soviet Red Army and then the Taliban.

The bustling town of Charikar, just off the main road, was until 12 years ago a picture of devastation. Accused of supporting the Northern Alliance, the town bore the brunt of Taliban violence.

"Thousands of trees were cut down, fields and vineyards burnt, houses destroyed and people killed," Abdul Qodoas, a history teacher at Mirwais High School, said.

But the Taliban's "scorched earth" policy finds no mention in the new history textbooks either.

'For students it is important to study every political regime whether its rule was good or bad," Mr Qudoas said.

"One of the primary objectives of studying history is not to repeat past mistakes. If students will not learn about past violence, how will they avoid it in future?"
'Deception'
Education Minister Farooq Wardak says the decision to delete part of history from the books is based on the larger interest of the country.

The fear is that children are being denied the truth about key historical events

"There are hundreds and thousands of issues over which there is disagreement in the nation," he told the BBC.

"My responsibility is to bring unity not disunity in the country. I am not going to encourage a divisive education agenda.

''Now, if I am writing something over which there is no national consensus - I am taking the disagreement, even the war to the class, and school of Afghanistan. I will never do that.''

But for many others, what has been done to the curriculum is simply "deception". How can you move forward if you brush your past under the carpet and don't confront it, such critics argue.

"Kabul was destroyed during the civil war, thousands of people were killed," said a female member of parliament, also on condition of anonymity.

"During the Taliban rule atrocities were committed on females. They were prohibited from working or going to school. Hundreds of women were stoned to death for alleged adultery. None of this finds a place in textbooks. Are we not hiding the truth from the children of this country?"

More photos of Afghanistan in the 70's

Unfortunately I don't know have any information on these photos other than that they were taken in the 70's.













 all photos from http://endilletante.tumblr.com/

Photos of daily life in Afghanistan

what's under the burqa?

she is!






Afghan girl scouts!




orphans.  no smiles.

















 

 



















 






Jamilah, 25, is a leg amputee. She is pictured here with her son Javid, 6, and her daughters Bahara, 3, and baby Elham.




 






















Frozen lake in Kabul


HA!


Students studying at Kabul University




(this appears to be an old photo)

 



























 










nomads


Afghan women march with banners to protest the recent public execution of a young woman for alleged adultery, in Kabul on July 11, 2012



at a calligraphy school


love the glasses!

All photos taken from http://afghanistaninphotos.tumblr.com/